A few words from Jo Malone’s lat­est scent.

Ro­mance is def­i­nitely in the air.

My par­ents aren’t as fa­mous as Wil­liam and Kate, and I’m not BFF s with Princess Char­lotte—yet—but my “father,” basil, comes from the Greek word basileus, which means king. My “mother,” neroli, is named after Anne Marie Orsini, the 17th-cen­tury princess of Nerola, Italy. But don’t let my royal lin­eage in­tim­i­date you. Cé­line Roux, one of the “match­mak­ers” be­hind this fra­grance love affair, de­scribes me this way: “This scent, like the English, is orig­i­nal, care­free and a lit­tle bit ec­cen­tric but very el­e­gant.”

Who will be my fu­ture prince?

I’m per­fect on my own, but per­fumers Flipo and Roux love lay­er­ing fra­grances. They say that my ideal match is Jo Malone’s Black Cedar­wood & Ju­niper. “It’s not a king or a princess, but it’s sexy and a lit­tle naughty,” says Roux. We agree to meet. “Do you like the affair?” she asks. “Love at first scent,” I con­fess.

I have some fairly fa­mous rel­lies.

Some 25 years ago, basil was the cen­tral note in the now-iconic Lime Basil & Man­darin. In 2003, Orange Blos­som, with its clementine-flower notes, was re­leased. “It was a break­through when we in­tro­duced basil, so we wanted to bring that un­ex­pected twist to this new scent,” says Flipo. “We imag­ined that neroli would be the per­fect coun­ter­bal­ance to the basil and a nod to Orange Blos­som, which is also a best­seller.”

It was a high­tech affair.

Basil and neroli didn’t meet in the fra­grance-world equiv­a­lent of Tin­der, but their ro­mance wasn’t an old-fash­ioned case of mix­ing one note with an­other to seek com­pat­i­bil­ity ei­ther. Anne Flipo, the brand’s mas­ter per­fumer, used Headspace tech­nol­ogy, a tech­nique for cap­tur­ing scents em­a­nat­ing from ob­jects. “We imag­ined that these two plants could have a re­la­tion­ship,” she ex­plains. “We cap­tured the unique air­borne scent that re­sulted from their union.”

Our first date

For my cam­paign, a gor­geous young cou­ple was filmed “lark­ing” their way through Lon­don. “There’s a ’60s mood,” says Roux, who is Jo Malone Lon­don’s vice-pres­i­dent of global fra­grance de­vel­op­ment. “Think of Twiggy and the Bea­tles and how they cap­tured that care­free, he­do­nis­tic spirit of the times.” For my first date with Black Cedar­wood & Ju­niper, Roux sug­gested that we lark around the Columbia Road Flower Mar­ket. We did—but we also stopped at the Jo Malone Lon­don flag­ship store on Re­gent Street, and that’s where I met Dark Am­ber & Ginger Lily. Who says a girl has to be ex­clu­sive?